Mark Steyn again
Stan Pierce
dog faeces and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than
the former. That's the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the
thug states members of the same club, the danger isn't that they'll meet each
other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters,
seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam
Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than George W
Bush and Tony Blair did"
The Daily Telegraph, February 15th
http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=70
morriss...@yahoo.com
Dude, Mark Steyn haas been discredited as a fool and a liar. Why would
you quote him?
morriss...@yahoo.com
Dude, Mark Steyn has been discredited as a fool and a liar. Why would
you quote him?
The Right One
<morriss...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1136400304.1...@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
--
Terry Pearson
http://www.rightpoint.org
Shaping Canada's Destiny
http://www.rightpoint.org/2006im/deilly2.jpg
Stan Pierce
<morriss...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1136400310....@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
(snipped
> Dude, Mark Steyn has been discredited as a fool and a liar. Why would
> you quote him?
>
Discredited by whom, Breen?
Redbaiter
He won't answer.. like most yellow backed leftist cowards, he can do
the smear, but he can't do the substance..
morriss...@yahoo.com
Like all fools and liars, primarily by his own foolishness and lies.
But there's a wealth of commentary by informed and serious media
commentators pointing out Steyn's brutality, hypocrisy and gullibility.
It's interesting tat when Ted unthinkingly calls Steyn a "respected"
writer (he means, of course, in comparison to the oafishly incompetent
Ann Coulter) the readers are aghast. The universal contempt for Steyn
displayed here shows just what intelligent people think of the
chickenhawk....
http://crookedtimber.org/2004/02/19/mark-steyn
Mark Steyn (by TED)
Ann Coulter is not really a pundit; she's a political insult comic.
When she lied about Max Cleland's Vietnam injuries in her column last
week, I heard about it, but didn't comment. Life's too short.
(Besides, Tbogg, Arthur Silber, and Senator Jack Reed did a good job
with it.)
Mark Steyn has repeated the story, using Ann Coulter as a source.
As Ann Coulter pointed out in a merciless but entirely accurate column,
it wasn't on the "battlefield." It wasn't in combat. He was
working on a radio relay station. He saw a grenade dropped by one of
his colleagues and bent down to pick it up. It's impossible for most
of us to imagine what that must be like-to be flown home, with your
body shattered, not because of some firefight, but because of a stupid
mistake.
It's not clear where Coulter got her story; she cites no source.
Steyn cites Coulter. If you can't trust Ann Coulter, as the saying
goes, who can you trust?
It's rather more clear where Max Cleland got his story:
"On April 8, 1968, I volunteered for one last mission. The helicopter
moved in low. The troops jumped out with M16 rifles in hand as we
crouched low to the ground to avoid the helicopter blades. Then I saw
the grenade. It was where the chopper had lifted off. It must be mine,
I thought. Grenades had fallen off my web gear before. Shifting the M16
to my left hand and holding it behind me, I bent down to pick up the
grenade.
"A blinding explosion threw me backwards."
Here's the Washington Post on the incident:
"On April 8, 1968, during the siege of Khe Sanh, he stepped off a
helicopter and saw a grenade at his feet. He thought he'd dropped it.
He was wrong. When he reached down to pick it up, it exploded, ripping
off both legs and his right hand. He was 25."
Here's Esquire: "Cleland lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam when a
grenade accidentally detonated after he and another soldier jumped off
a helicopter in a combat zone."
Steyn and Coulter both agree that Max Cleland is no hero. Steyn say
that "Mr. Cleland at last no longer demurs to be passed off as a hero
wounded in battle-because that makes him a more valuable mascot to
the campaign. Sad." Coulter says, "Max Cleland should stop allowing
Democrats to portray him as a war hero who lost his limbs taking enemy
fire on the battlefields of Vietnam. "
The United States military would disagree. As Truthout notes:
In a separate incident four days before he lost three limbs, Cleland
won a Silver Star - one of the highest honors for combat courage the
U.S. military gives out. The congressional citation which came with the
medal specifically said that during a "heavy enemy rocket and mortar
attack Captain Cleland, disregarding his own safety, exposed himself to
the rocket barrage as he left his covered position to administer first
aid to his wounded comrades. He then assisted in moving the injured
personnel to covered positions." The citation concluded,
"Cleland's gallant action is in keeping with the highest traditions
of the military service, and reflects great credit upon himself, his
unit and the United States Army."
Ann Coulter is a clown. Every time you mention her, your body loses 21
grams. But Mark Steyn is a respected voice. Look at his website to see
some of the places he's been published. When the popular blog
Right-Wing News did a poll among conservative bloggers about their
favorite columnist, he was far and away the first choice. He got more
votes than the next ten columnists combined. Instapundit has quoted or
linked to him in 104 separate posts, by my count.
If any of you folks are reading... any second thoughts?
posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2004 at 5:39 pm
comments
1.
Just one comment, Ted, "bearded Canadian clown jumped up from the
cinema reviews for crawling to Mrs Conrad Black" isn't spelt
"respected voice". I disagree that anyone takes Steyn seriously.
Posted by dsquared · February 19th, 2004 at 5:44 pm
2.
The thing about Mark Steyn is that he's very, very, very, VERY funny.
Whereas Ann Coulter is just scary and unpleasant.
Posted by Anthony C · February 19th, 2004 at 6:16 pm
3.
Coulter is worse than a clown, she's a foul, nasty insult-monger. But
in this case she seems to have some evidence on her side. Yes, Cleland
was "in a combat zone"-the whole damned country was a combat
zone-and yes, he did brave deeds (as recognized by his Silver Star).
So if the question is whether Max Cleland should be commended for his
bravery in the Vietnam War, the answer is clearly Yes. But if the
question is more specifically how he lost his limbs, then it seems
straightforward that he did so in an accident, not in combat. Ted's
quotes from the Washington Post and Esquire conveniently leave out the
whole context, which Coulter actually supplies in her recent follow-up
column. So there's fudging on both sides. Coulter conveniently leaves
out the larger context of Cleland's strong record of military
service; people like Ted leave out the specific context of Cleland's
terrible injuries. In the midst of "Liar Liar" accusations, few
seem to have the patience to get the story right.
Posted by Ayjay · February 19th, 2004 at 6:33 pm
4.
I disagree that anyone takes Steyn seriously. I take Steyn as seriously
as I take any commentator on politics. His writing often displays an
appealing lightness of touch. Coulter I find morally repulsive, even
though she too is clever at times. In her unremitting malice, she
reminds me of you, titboy.
Posted by mandarin · February 19th, 2004 at 6:33 pm
trop...@gmail.com
You're thinking of Noam Chomsky, the Khmer Rouge fan.......
EKur...@aol.com
> It's not clear where Coulter got her story; she cites no source.
> Steyn cites Coulter. If you can't trust Ann Coulter, as the saying
> goes, who can you trust?
QUOTE
One of the most detailed accounts of Cleland's life was written by Jill
Zuckman in a lengthy piece for The Boston Globe Sunday magazine on Aug.
3, 1997:
"Finally, the battle at Khe Sanh was over. Cleland, 25 years old, and
two members of his team were now ordered to set up a radio relay
station at the division assembly area, 15 miles away. The three
gathered antennas, radios and a generator and made the 15-minute
helicopter trip east. After unloading the equipment, Cleland climbed
back into the helicopter for the ride back. But at the last minute, he
decided to stay and have a beer with some friends. As the helicopter
was lifting off, he shouted to the pilot that he was staying behind and
jumped several feet to the ground.
"Cleland hunched over to avoid the whirring blades and ran. Turning to
face the helicopter, he caught sight of a grenade on the ground where
the chopper had perched. It must be mine, he thought, moving toward it.
He reached for it with his right arm just as it exploded, slamming him
back and irreparably altering his plans for a bright, shining future."
snip
"He told the pilot he was going to stay awhile. Maybe have a few beers
with friends. ... Then Cleland looked down and saw a grenade. Where'd
that come from? He walked toward it, bent down, and crossed the line
between before and after." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dec. 5, 1999)
"(Cleland) didn't step on a land mine. He wasn't wounded in a
firefight. He couldn't blame the Viet Cong or friendly fire. The Silver
Star and Bronze Star medals he received only embarrassed him. He was no
hero. He blew himself up." (The Baltimore Sun, Oct. 24, 1999)
"Cleland was no war hero, but his sacrifice was great. ... Democratic
Senate candidate Max Cleland is a victim of war, not a casualty of
combat. He lost three limbs on a long-forgotten hill near Khe Sanh
because of some American's mistake ..." (The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, Sept. 29, 1996)
In Cleland's own words: "I didn't see any heroism in all that. It
wasn't an act of heroism. I didn't know the grenade was live. It was an
act of fate." That is why Cleland didn't win a Purple Heart, which is
given to those wounded in combat. Liberals are not angry because I
"lied"; they're angry because I told the truth.
Liberals simply can't grasp the problem Lexis-Nexis poses to their
incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty - hysterical
overreaction. The truth is not their forte.
END QUOTE
morriss...@yahoo.com
Dude, as your dull abuse makes clear, you're way out of your depth.
> http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter021904.asp
Why would you expose your gullibility by quoting such an extreme right
rag as this? Oh, that's right -- you wouldn't have even thought about
it.
morriss...@yahoo.com
You still trying that moronic lie, moron?
EKur...@aol.com
As Coulter says - you should stick to your specialty.
Sue Bilstein
> morriss...@yahoo.com wrote:
> >
> > Dude, as your dull abuse makes clear, you're way out of your depth.
> >
> > > http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter021904.asp
> >
> > Why would you expose your gullibility by quoting such an extreme right
> > rag as this? Oh, that's right -- you wouldn't have even thought about
> > it.
>
> As Coulter says - you should stick to your specialty.
Oh, he is. Breen's specialty is hatred and lies.
Zardoz
"Sue Bilstein" <sue_bi...@yahoo.com> wrote
> > As Coulter says - you should stick to your specialty.
>
> Oh, he is. Breen's specialty is hatred and lies.
>
And if you support Coulter, you support someone who has no other purpose but
to promote sensationalized hate. I have no doubt that you're just another
mentally handicapped right wing imbecile.
trop...@gmail.com
What lie? Chomsky was a Khmer Rouge apologist. Well documented.
Stan Pierce
"Zardoz" <zar...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:423656F...@individual.net...
She sensationalises acute perception. Big difference to your Gramsciite choice
of words.
Wylie Wilde
Read about Noam Chomsky the weasel.
"..there are many other sources on recent events in Cambodia that have not
been brought to the attention of the American reading public. Space
limitations preclude a comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far
Eastern Economic Review, the London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of
Politics, and others elsewhere, have provided analyses by highly qualified
specialists who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who
concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands; that these
were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant
discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of
starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing."
Yet the same sources never claimed such a thing.
Leftist historians are all the same. Falsify the evidence or make false
claims. Make a lot of noise in the right places. And call anyone who
discredits them- fascists.
Mike Eisler
More importantly, unlike Steyn, no one pays to read his opinions.
Michael Wallace
Further evidence that the PC droids are fucking up Western
civilisation with their dribbling brain dead ideology. oh, did I hurt
anyone's feelings?
http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=13966&cid=15&cname=Politics
Study: PC cripples policy-making in Britain
Politically correct speech and thought "is poisoning the wells of
debate in modern Britain," according to a new study from think-tank
Civitas.
The study -- The Retreat of Reason, by Anthony Browne -- argues that
factually incorrect arguments can trump factually correct ones due to
the influence of political correctness.
That, in turn, can lead to poor policy formulation since it takes many
explanations off the table altogether.
Among the examples cited in the study is a growing tendency to blame a
rise in "skinhead" activities for increasing numbers of anti-semitic
attacks when the factually correct explanation is that a rise in
activity by Muslim youths is to blame.
Another example is blaming sex discrimination for pay inequities
affecting women when the factually correct cause is down to different
work/life choices and childcare breaks.
Similarly, Mr Browne argues, the rise in HIV infections is often
blamed on unsafe sex among teenage populations when the real cause is
a rise in African immigration.
On the macro scale, deepening poverty in Africa is blamed by the
politically correct on the West not giving enough aid, while the truth
is that bad governance is the primary driver.
"'In the topsy-turvy politically correct world, truth comes in two
forms: the politically correct, and the factually correct.
"The politically correct truth is publicly proclaimed correct by
politicians, celebrities and the BBC even if it is wrong, while the
factually correct truth is publicly condemned as wrong even when it is
right.
"Factually correct truths suffer the disadvantage that they don't have
to be shown to be wrong, merely stated that they are politically
incorrect.
"To the politically correct, truth is no defence; to the politically
incorrect, truth is the ultimate defence," Mr Browne argues.
Mr Browne's study says that PC is much more than just a dispute about
words, or the hope of avoiding hurtful expressions: it leads to an
incorrect analysis of real problems, which means that the wrong
solutions are attempted.
People suffer as a result, he says.
"Black communities are encouraged to blame racist teachers for the
failings of their boys at school, rather than re-examine their own
culture and attitudes to education that may be the prime reasons.
"The poor sick have ended up having worse healthcare in Britain than
they would in mainland Europe because PC for long closed down debate
on fundamental NHS reform.
"Women's employment opportunities can be harmed by giving them ever
more rights that are not given to men.
"The unemployed are encouraged to languish on benefits blaming others
for their fate.
"Poor Africans are condemned to live in poverty so long as they and
their governments are encouraged to blame the West for all their
problems, rather than confronting the real causes of poor governance,
corruption and poor education," he says.
Mr Browne claims that PC is an invention of Western intellectuals who
feel guilty about the universal triumph of Western values and economic
prosperity.
However, he says, threats to the influence of the West may bring
political correctness to an end.
"Political correctness is essentially the product of a powerful but
decadent civilisation which feels secure enough to forego reasoning
for emoting, and to subjugate truth to goodness.
"However, the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, and those that
followed in Bali, Madrid and Beslan, have led to a sense of
vulnerability that have made people far more hard-headed about the
real benefits and drawbacks of Western civilisation," he says.
Westerners will stop feeling guilty about their position when it has
to be defended against rival cultures and ideologies, he says, noting
that the rise of economies such as India and China will hasten this
process.
"In the long run of history, political correctness will be seen as an
aberration in Western thought," Mr Browne says.
"The product of the uniquely unchallenged position of the West and
unrivalled affluence, the comparative decline of the West compared to
the East is likely to spell its demise.
"Finally, Western minds may be free again to reason rather than just
emote, to pursue objective truth rather than subjective virtue."
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
"Support" Coulter? She's a journalist, not a charity or a political
party. I guess your strange choice of terms reflects your partisan
world-view. There is no true or false, just your gang of ideologues
vs. the world.
Anyway, it looks like she has the facts about this politician's war
wounds. So good on her for that.
But my post was about Breen. I know quite a lot about him: he comes
from the same country & probably the same town as I do. I have read a
few of his posts over the years. He is rabidly anti-American,
virulently left-wing, and a stranger to the truth. In other words, he
belongs to your gang of ideologues.
pcourterelle
<morriss...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1136400304.1...@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Chickenhawk alert!
>
> Dude, Mark Steyn haas been discredited as a fool and a liar. Why would
> you quote him?
That's why the Wall Street Journal, National Post, Sunday Telegraph and a
host of other major dailies and magazines publish Steyn's op-eds and
columns. (Well that and Tubby Black was fond of him but Tubby now has his
own big ass to worry about). If nothing else Steyn is amusing. I am
surprised that Steyn has been slumming on the Western Standard though.
pc
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
I haven't read a lot of Steyn's stuff, but I do see his column in the
Spectator (that left-wing rag) from time to time. I was not impressed
with the piece he wrote about Conrad Black. He seemed to have no
understanding that it is a very bad thing for executives to plunder
their corporations - or that we punish them severely because this
behaviour, if winked at, leads to economic collapse.
joseph....@virgin.net
He's a rent-a-rant gobshite, basically. There's plenty of them about,
and I suppose he's marginally less irritating than Julie Burchill.
Stan Pierce
"Michael Wallace" <mic...@partsdirectaust.com.au> wrote in message
news:mklpr1pk0fq3q7dd9...@4ax.com...
>
> Further evidence that the PC droids are fucking up Western
> civilisation with their dribbling brain dead ideology. oh, did I hurt
> anyone's feelings?
> http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=13966&cid=15&cname=Politics
Well, yes. He got that right.
The most disgraceful example of the emotive thinking in Australia was the
blaming of the Australians wanting to bash the Lebanese troublemakers up for
attacking Cronulla Lifeguards. The PC Crowd called them White Supremacists.
The PC Crowd, if they were real Australians ought to have been in the crush to
wipe the Lebanese off the streets. The time has come to get the names of the
PC Crowd journalists and do them over as well and stain their faces with some
coffee coloured substance that takes weeks to get off.... or tar and feather
them. Shame usually gets at people at some point.
Gob Bluth
Yeah, we really showed those Lebs didn't we? They bash surf lifesavers,
we can do better than that, we go and bash some ambulance workers.
Michael Wallace
What a sad, misguided lot feminists are, almost as sad as the neutered
leftie males they've created...
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060109_118922_118922
The war on terror is the real women's issue
Feminists whine about life in the West but they won't fight the bigger
battle
MARK STEYN
What patriarchal dragons are left for feminists to slay? Well,
according to Rachel Smolkin in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Women
make up only 1.3 per cent of plumbers, pipe fitters and steamfitters .
. ."
Golly. Maybe laying pipe is something that particularly appeals to
boys, and maybe girls would rather be the hotshot lawyers who sue the
contractor for not hiring enough female plumbers: in America, after
all, 60 per cent of college graduates are now women. Both sets of
statistics come from Kate O'Beirne's rollicking polemic Women Who Make
the World Worse, and, whether or not you agree with the title, it's
hard to argue that feminism hasn't won pretty much every battle in
every sphere of modern Western life -- not least the academy. It's not
just that 60 per cent of graduates are female but that the 40 per cent
who aren't exist in a thoroughly feminized culture.
Thus, every December 6, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to
half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the
blame for the Montreal massacre -- the 14 women murdered by Marc
Lepine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater,
though you wouldn't know that from the press coverage. Yet the
defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M
Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who,
ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned
their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that
would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout
human history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as
they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over
and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did
nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer
from an excess of testosterone.
Your average Western feminist lobby group doesn't see it that way,
naturally. "The feminism I think of is the one that embodies
inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world
through the humanity that women do bring," says Stephanie Davis,
executive director of Atlanta's Women's Foundation. "If there were
women in power in representative numbers -- 52 per cent -- I think
that the World Trade Center would still be standing."
That's a familiar line. If only your average Security Council meeting
looked like a college graduating class, or that room at the École
Polytechnique after the men had departed, there would be peace on
earth. As an argument, it overlooks the fact that large parts of the
world are already, in political terms, as thoroughly feminized as they
can get. Robert Kagan's book, Of Paradise And Power, explicitly frames
transatlantic relations as a gender relationship: "Americans are from
Mars, Europeans are from Venus." And, though we live in the Martian
part of town, Canada long ago had the hormone treatments and a couple
of snips and crossed over to the Venusian side of the street.
Unfortunately, those societies that most enthusiastically aligned
themselves with feminist priorities are also the ones that are --
what's the word? -- doomed. If abortion is, as Kate O'Beirne calls it,
feminism's "holy grail," there are more than a few countries that must
wish they'd never stumbled upon it. In the seventies, the average
Russian woman apparently exercised her "right to choose" no less than
seven times. Today, abortions outnumber live births. As a result,
Russia is at the start of a demographic death spiral unprecedented in
a relatively advanced society not at war. While its womenfolk have a
life expectancy comparable to their Canadian counterparts, the sickly
Russian male expires in his 50s. So far, in this first large-scale
experiment on the dispensability of men, it appears that, in the
broader societal sense, fish do indeed need bicycles.
That's a Gloria Steinem line, of course. These days Gloria is -- what?
83? 112? -- and still looks fabulously hot, but, like The Feminism of
Doria Gray, it's her ideology that's gotten all wrinkled and saggy. In
their peculiarly reductive definition of "women's issues," older
Western feminists sound squaresville and younger ones sound kooky.
Just before the 2004 U.S. elections, Cameron Diaz appeared on the
Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our
bodies . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote.
But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised
Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."
The question is not whether Cameron's lost all rights to her body, but
whether she's lost her mind. After presenting the 2004 Presidential
election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be
interested to know that men enjoy that right under Islamic legal codes
around the world -- and, given that more countries live under Sharia
than did 50 years ago, that means more women have "lost the right to
their bodies". Under the Taliban, women were prevented by law from
ever feeling sunlight on their faces. Following the country's
liberation by right-wing patriarchs like Bush and Blair, there are
now, as Linda Frum noted here the other week, more females in
electoral politics in Afghanistan than in Canada.
In other words, isn't the war on terror the real "women's issue"? As
Ahmad al-Baqer, an MP from one of the more progressive Muslim nations
(Kuwait), breezily put it, nixing a proposal to give broads the right
to vote, "God said in the holy Koran that men are better than women.
Why can't we settle for that?" Why indeed? From the Associated Press:
"Multan, Pakistan -- Nazir Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he
recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and
their 25-year-old stepsister to salvage his family's 'honor' . . ."
Alas for Mr. Ahmed's daughters, that's all a long way away for Susan
Sarandon, Gloria Steinem and the other sisters whose contribution to
the liberation of Afghanistan was to oppose it. But the "honour
killings" are getting closer. In London last summer, the police
announced they were re-opening investigations into 120 deaths among
British Muslim girls that they'd hitherto declined to look at too
closely on grounds of "cultural sensitivity." There's a small flurry
-- enough almost to form a new category for the Governor-General's
Awards -- in books itemizing the violence to women, gay men and other
approved groups in the new EUtopia: Claire Berlinski's Menace In
Europe and Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept are a staggering
accumulation of riveting vignettes, like the non-Muslim girls in les
banlieues of France opting to wear veils and other Islamic coverings
to lessen the likelihood of being abused and assaulted in the streets.
Which issue will impact more women's lives? The lack of female
pipefitters? Or the combination of factors at play in those French --
and Belgian, and Scandinavian, and maybe even Canadian -- suburbs? Yet
Western feminists sing the ancient songs of long-won revolutions as
relentlessly as drunks on St Patrick's Day: "Have fewer children,
later in life," advises Joan Peters. That's the strategy that
demographically's delivering western Europe into the hands of a
culture far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad.
"Keep your Bush off my bush!" chanted the ladies on Washington's Mall
a year ago at the Million-Abortionist March or whatever it was called.
If any of those women still exercise their "reproductive rights", they
might want to ponder the likelihood of any girl born today being able
to prance around demonstrations in the Eurabian Paris or Brussels of
2030 or 2040 yelling "Hands off my bush!" C'mon, gals! Anyone can beat
up post-feminist neutered Western males. Why not pick on a target
worth the effort?
EKur...@aol.com
> > And if you support Coulter, you support someone who has no other purpose but
> > to promote sensationalized hate. I have no doubt that you're just another
> > mentally handicapped right wing imbecile.
..as opposed to being a right-wing imbecile who is not mentally
handicapped, I suppose.
Stan Pierce wrote:
> She sensationalises acute perception.
Exactly. Very well put, if I might say so.
Stan Pierce
>
> What a sad, misguided lot feminists are, almost as sad as the neutered
> leftie males they've created...
>
> http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060109_118922_118922
The Bird Flue will sort things out. The New Plague will change the world
drastically.
greg...@yahoo.com
Michael Wallace quoted the article:
[...]
> http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20060109_118922_118922
[...]
> MARK STEYN
>
> What patriarchal dragons are left for feminists to slay? Well,
> according to Rachel Smolkin in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Women
> make up only 1.3 per cent of plumbers, pipe fitters and steamfitters .
> . ."
Boo friggin hoo
[...]
> Thus, every December 6, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to
> half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the
> blame for the Montreal massacre
"Tries" being the operative word. Don't let them.
> -- the 14 women murdered by Marc
> Lepine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater,
> though you wouldn't know that from the press coverage. Yet the
> defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M
> Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who,
> ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so,
Look at it the other way around. If someone had been holding an
assault rifle on the men, and she had ordered the women to leave, would
the women have risked their lives defending the men? Obviously not.
The men's alternative was to rush Lepine, resulting in some or all of
them being shot down. But the women could have done this too, and the
women had more incentive to do so because they were doomed anyway. So
why villify the men for not doing what the women also could have done?
Were the men more capable? Not according to the feminist dogma
observed at the time.
> and abandoned
> their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that
> would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout
> human history.
So would feminism.
If you drill into men the idea that you're equal, some will believe it,
and in a pinch, they'll think you're as capable of self-defense as they
are. The men in Montreal obviously thought so.
> The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as
> they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over
<yawn> If you'll say I'm not a man if I won't take a bullet for a
woman, just remember that I can ignore you faster than you can bitch.
> and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did
> nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer
> from an excess of testosterone.
Testosterone doesn't give a man the overwhelming desire to die.
> Your average Western feminist lobby group doesn't see it that way,
> naturally. "The feminism I think of is the one that embodies
> inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world
> through the humanity that women do bring," says Stephanie Davis,
> executive director of Atlanta's Women's Foundation. "If there were
> women in power in representative numbers -- 52 per cent -- I think
> that the World Trade Center would still be standing."
Here's another problem. You expect us to take insults like this, and
still charge into machine guns when you get into a bind.
[...]
> Russian male expires in his 50s. So far, in this first large-scale
> experiment on the dispensability of men, it appears that, in the
> broader societal sense, fish do indeed need bicycles.
Well, they say they don't, so someone should just make a choice.
Either we're your protectors, and should be willing to take bullets for
you, or you are our equals, and not in need of anything from us. Pick
one, and stick with it.
[...]
Rifty
> The Bird Flue will sort things out. The New Plague will change the world
> drastically.
Will the 'Flue' benefit feminists or assist them, Stan? I'm trying to
understand your leap of logic from an attack on feminism to bird flu.
Rifty
PS You're dead right to be scared of the latter!
--
Academic and Computing Help
http://rifty.net
Michael Wallace
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.
BY MARK STEYN
Wednesday, January 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as
baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will
not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear
within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European
countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map
marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul
there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a
cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate.
Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for
real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization
is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to
save at least some parts of the West.
One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign
in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at
least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in
the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the
secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day
care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity
leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the
secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family,
faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and
multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those
secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.
Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of
the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most
Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious
politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the
health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a
promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it
requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian
hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than
Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to
ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century
variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from
reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion.
The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their
weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why
they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and
significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't
accept that proposition--then what exactly is the war about?
We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war
against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its
merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of
us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general
rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants:
Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir,
Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand,
Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists
in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act
locally.
Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about.
Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the
HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too
weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S.
military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were
like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours
facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very
quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they
can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent
chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses
in on itself and Islam inherits by default.
That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As
a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from
suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western
world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare,
abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real
suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about
multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about
other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of
Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other
cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was
subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that
all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced
Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some
wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of
getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic
masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality,
but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an
African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of
progressive humbug.
Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about
every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush
did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom
did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario
didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to
denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he
didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime
ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the
Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever
reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's
citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that
as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the
Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big
meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a
mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with
reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the
enemy."
Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set
the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old
definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light
changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new
definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press
release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against
Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad
taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by
scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there
is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is
awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's
Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a
Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from
Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the
measure of us.
Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along.
In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister
Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness
Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage
"Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are
fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own
fundamentalisms."
Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal
fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist
upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is
something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure
that's true."
Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance
is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is
intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the
highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to
gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like
that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson
of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the
AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay
agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most
extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.
For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to
Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son
and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the
Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he
was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks
in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that
the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on
terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being
judgmental) but no one can argue that they aren't in the thick of
things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after
killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at
Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier
in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani
forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit
in this war!
In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was
paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison
hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so
he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm
Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow
Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."
As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the
circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he
providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in
fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light
Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been
participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the
Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side.
Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims
on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to
demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked
about the Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you
are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to
disagree."
That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose
which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card
arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The
Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He
could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many
of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to
provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more
than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and,
while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away
with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a
wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state.
Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister
will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the
forces of intolerance consume him.
That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and
conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups
persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets:
The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the
capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that
while they could never win militarily, they also could never be
defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is
that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first
truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole
world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and
they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see
them off.
We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites, and
we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have
behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were
just a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob
could rise up and hang 'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not
unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes
way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of
most of the key responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care
of your elderly parents--has profoundly changed the relationship
between the citizen and the state. At some point--I would say
socialized health care is a good marker--you cross a line, and it's
very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government
largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with
that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with
conservative audiences: "A government big enough to give you
everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."
Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government
big enough to give you everything you want still isn't big enough to
get you to give anything back. That's what the French and German
political classes are discovering.
Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has
held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy
about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the
Nigerians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians
and Danes and New Zealanders?
So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a
prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk,"
it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the
clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy
worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's
bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,"
you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going
belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's
why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same
with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious
choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much
every society collapses because it chops down its trees.
Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with
the trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing
reforestation.) One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by
choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more
wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other
civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult of
worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his
bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul
Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo
famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of
Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of
mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and
copper, lead and gas by 1993.
None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is
happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out
of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of
the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest
country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's
dying--its population is falling calamitously.
The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from
terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the
perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote,
"Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and
does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."
And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom
blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30
years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended
estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the
United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction
of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of
species. . . . More than half the world will be afflicted by water
shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe
problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of
birds will be extinct . . ."
Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian
headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the
world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn
good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the
Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of
their natural habitat.
There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide
emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying
about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about
things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the
things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless
wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the
very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly
jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing
dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a
hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably
possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any
Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.
In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about
First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral,
primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a
threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the
peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World.
Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural
China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is
killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's
the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but
the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken
what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of
Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully
exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo
. . .
What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and
pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its
culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the
nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in
2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026
(or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their
Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on
babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot
faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number
you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not
getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well
above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83,
Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in
common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and
you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement
rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79,
Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below
replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the
death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half
replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every
generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%,
Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends
suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of
the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest
birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.
By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more
Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.
As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of
Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever
been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going
out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways.
Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election
results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that,
while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're
unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their
government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a
generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously
reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a
proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's
presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the
average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The
average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his
American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain
electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.
This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and
the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to
allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S.
military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated
European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could
concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's
problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose
fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created
NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the
Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having
been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's
hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder
them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the
Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term
softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to
resisting a primal force like Islam.
There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are
declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet
may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at
the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The
groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge
advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have
understood that their so-called population explosion was really a
massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population
between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of
it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000,
the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's
population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about
15% to 20%.
Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of
the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants
are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but
the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your
car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the
stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the
Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems
pretty much the same but slightly modified.
And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald
statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of
the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they
were the same: each had about 20%.
And by 2020?
So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then
and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having
taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or
the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries
(Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing
religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend
religious services each week.
Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having
consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent
after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing,
but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a
remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or
ill, shaped the modern world.
What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the
one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America
will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than
M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's
track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this
is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough
suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple
America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given
their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging
Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into
buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few
more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?
The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows
a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You
don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually
there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly,
self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of
all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking
Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything
from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of
the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no
children has no future.
Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the
Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within
half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed
Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us
the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position
was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the
world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent
fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.
Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents,
so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official
described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional
societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature.
Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future,
as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great
majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is
that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not,
they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than
it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the
permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we
now know that it's suicidally so.
To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at
a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the
EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much
everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a
shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop
spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU
collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that
within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal
contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way,
and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and
assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they
avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America
militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there
will be 500 million Americans, and what's left in Europe will either
be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its
population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a
death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be
an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos?
Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a
trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax
rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot
sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.
In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress, Tony Blair remarked: "As
Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but,
in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?"
Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled
power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic
inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key
regional players in the world today--Australia, India, South
Africa--and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the
Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will
be because the People's Republic learns more from British Hong Kong
than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the
dominant power of our time derives its political character from
18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further
than the mother country was willing to go.
A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history
triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent
than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the
West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.
What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If
European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the
populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60,
etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits
the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the
Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by
2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of
population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly
Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly
Islamic in its political character?
This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not
entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading
sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut:
I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is
feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult
of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society
is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first
victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take
the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping
imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case
that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a
woman's right to choose," in any sense.
I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley
Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush
off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White
Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to
choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands
of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of
those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have
babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl
born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance
around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands
off my bush!"
Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron
Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:
"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our
bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote.
But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised
Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."
Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost
all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to
France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
But, after framing the 2004 presidential election as a referendum on
the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men
enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In
his book "The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the
children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from
people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if
sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven,
individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market
culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new Dark Ages."
Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John
Ashcroft out there.
Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western
liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there
will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a
generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what
proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and
inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of
your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't
matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part
of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the
other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether
the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.
Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to
promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives"
have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty
and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's
true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the
day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of
British Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If
a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding
group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more
fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims
within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in
more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the
survival of the "modern world"?
Not good.
"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very
few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the
midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories
that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings?
Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that
matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them
are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography,
stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then
"What do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.
kangarooistan
ISLAM IS EXPANDING as you point out
NON muslim world is shrinking as you point out
THE WAR IS AGAINST ISLAM
THE WESTERN PRESS / POLLYS , demonise ISLAM and invade and destroy any
thing they can in any muslim community, IT IS A WAR
THE TRUTH IS ALWAYS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
WESTERNERS WILL ONE DAY LEARN THIS BASIC FACT
MOST OF WOT WESTERN PRESS AND POLLYS ARE TELLING YOU ARE LIES, AND
MOST WESTERNERS ARE HAPPY TO PRETEND TO BELIEVE THE LIES COS
WESTERNERS ALWAYS WIN dont they???
theoldman
RodneyK
news:1136550915.6...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Mikein...@aol.com
requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. >
No need to add anything!!!!!
Michael Wallace
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1543591/posts
Mark Steyn: Racism is bad - so is self-delusion
What's the deal with these riots in Sydney? You switch on the
television and there's scenes of urban conflagration and you think,
"Hang on, I saw this story last month." But no. They were French
riots. These are Australian riots. Entirely different. The French
riots were perpetrated by - what's the word? - "youths". The
Australian riots were perpetrated by "white youths". Same age cohort,
but adjectivally enhanced.
And, being "white youths", they thus offered "a chilling glimpse into
the darker corners of Australian society", as Nick Squires put it last
week, "with thousands of white youths rampaging through a well-known
beach suburb, attacking people of Middle Eastern background. They were
egged on by white supremacists and neo-Nazis."
Gotcha. White youths egged on by white supremacists. You can't make a
racist omelette without egged whites. Cate Blanchett also subscribes
to the Squires line and, no disrespect to our man down under, she does
it rather more fetchingly. I'm goo-goo for Miss Blanchett in just
about every movie she's made and I'd cut her an awful lot of slack.
But on Friday she toddled along to Dolphin Point on Coogee Beach
wearing a white T-shirt showing the outline of Australia with the
single word "THINK" inside and stood in front of a banner calling for
"a wave of tolerance" to sweep the country (which sounds more like a
tsunami of tolerance). And, even as I was still drooling like a
schoolboy, I could feel myself starting to roll my eyes. At that
point, Miss Blanchett unburdened herself of this great insight: "It's
actually very clear and simple. Violence and racism are bad."
Thank God somebody had the courage to say it, eh? But isn't the
problem, in Australia and elsewhere, that it's not quite that "clear
and simple"?
Take "tolerance", for example. Wave-of-tolerance-wise, Australia for
years has looked like New Orleans the day after Katrina hit. The
broader Blanchett-Squires culture has been tolerant to a fault. In
Sydney in 2002, the leader of a group of Lebanese-Australian Muslim
gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years (halved on appeal).
The lads liked to tell the lucky lady that she was about to be "fucked
Leb-style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian
pig". It was the sentence that was "controversial". As Monroe Reimers
wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald: "As terrible as the crime was, we
must not confuse justice with revenge. Where has this hatred come
from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good
hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance
by our community and cultural institutions."
After 9/11, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all the
America-needs-to-ask-itself-what-it-did-to-provoke-this-anger stuff
because she used to work at a rape crisis centre and she'd heard this
blame-the-victim routine far too often: the Great Satan, like the
dolly bird in the low-cut top and mini-skirt, was asking for it. Even
so, it's still a surprise to hear the multiculti apologists apply the
argument to actual rape victims.
So suppose we do as Mr Reimers suggests and "take a good hard look" at
"racism by exclusion". As Monday's Australian reported: "Sydney's
western suburbs remained quiet yesterday after a call for a full day's
curfew by Lebanese community leaders. Mohammed Elriche, 19, said he
and his friends would have enjoyed nothing more than their regular
swim at Cronulla Beach, but their parents had asked him to stay at
home.
"His parents, Eddy and Samira, who have lived in Australia since 1972,
said their five children would be allowed to go to the beach again
only when the 'conflict is resolved and peace is restored' in the
Sutherland shire region. 'If there's no more conflict, I will let him
go,' Samira, 42, told the Australian in Arabic."
In Arabic? Let's suppose that Cate Blanchett got her wish and a tidal
wave of tolerance washed into all those "dark corners of Australian
society" taking the chill off the chilling glimpse Squires got. How
are even the most impeccably diverse multicultural types supposed to
welcome into the bosom of their boundlessly tolerant family a woman
who prefers to speak the language of the land she left at nine? When
it comes to "racism by exclusion", who's excluding whom?
There are no doubt "white racists" down under, but, as an explanation
of what's going on, it's almost quaintly absurd. "People of Middle
Eastern background" have prospered in Australia. The governor of New
South Wales, Marie Bashir, is Lebanese, as is her husband, Sir
Nicholas Shehadie, as is the premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks.
Likewise, in my own state of New Hampshire, one of the least racially
diverse jurisdictions in North America, the last Senate race was
nevertheless fought between a Republican, John Sununu, and a Democrat,
Jeanne Shaheen, both from Lebanese families.
All these successful politicians are of Lebanese Christian stock:
that's to say, after a third of a century in their new countries, they
weren't conversing with reporters in Arabic. It's not racial, it's
cultural. And the cries of "Racist!" are intended to make any
discussion of that cultural problem beyond the pale. In that sense,
Sydney's beach riots are a logical sequel to what happened in France.
From opposite ends of the planet, there are nevertheless many
similarities: non-Muslim women are hectored and insulted in the
streets of both Clichy-sous-Bois and Brighton-le-Sands. The only
difference is that, in Oz, the "white youths" decided to have a go
back.
These days, whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are
it involves a fellow called Mohammed. A plane flies into the World
Trade Centre? Mohammed Atta. A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at
Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. A sniper starts killing
petrol station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed. A
guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. A
terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. A gang-rapist in
Sydney? Mohammed Skaf.
Maybe all these Mohammeds are victims of Australian white racists and
American white racists and Dutch white racists and Balinese white
racists and Beslan schoolgirl white racists.
But the eagerness of the Aussie and British and Canadian and European
media, week in, week out, to attribute each outbreak of an apparently
universal phenomenon to strictly local factors is starting to look
pathological. "Violence and racism are bad", but so is self-delusion.
Michael Wallace
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
Homaidan Ali Al-Turki, 36, and his wife, Sarah Khonaizan, 35, appear
to be a model immigrant couple. They arrived in America in 2000 and
now live with their four children in an upscale Denver suburb. Mr.
Al-Turki is a graduate student in linguistics at the University of
Colorado, specializing in Arabic intonation and focus prosody. He
donates money to the Linguistic Society of America and is chief
executive of Al-Basheer Publications and Translations, a bookstore
specializing in titles about Islam.
Last week, however, the FBI accused the couple of enslaving an
Indonesian woman who is in her early 20s. For four years, reads the
indictment, they created "a climate of fear and intimidation through
rape and other means." The slave woman cooked, cleaned, took care of
the children, and performed other tasks for little or no pay, fearing
that if she did not obey, "she would suffer serious harm."
The two Saudis face charges of forced labor, aggravated sexual abuse,
document servitude, and harboring an alien. If found guilty, they
could spend the rest of their lives in prison. The government also
wants to seize the couple's Al-Basheer bank account to pay their
former slave $92,700 in back wages.
It's shocking, especially for a graduate student and owner of a
religious bookstore - but not particularly rare. Here are other
examples of enslavement, all involving Saudi royals or diplomats
living in America.
In 1982, a Miami judge issued a warrant to search Prince Turki Bin
Abdul Aziz's 24th-floor penthouse to determine if he was holding an
Egyptian woman, Nadia Lutefi Mustafa, against her will. Mr. Turki and
his French bodyguards prevented a search from taking place, then won
retroactive diplomatic immunity to forestall any legal unpleasantness.
In 1988, the Saudi defense attaché in Washington, Colonel Abdulrahman
S. Al-Banyan, employed a Thai domestic worker, Mariam Roungprach,
until she escaped his house by crawling out a window. She later said
that she had been imprisoned there, did not get enough food, and was
not paid. Interestingly, her work contract specified that she could
not leave the house or make telephone calls without her employer's
permission.
In 1991, Prince Saad Bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud and his wife, Princess
Noora, lived on two floors of the Ritz-Carlton in Houston. Two of
their servants, Josephine Alicog of the Philippines and Sriyani Marian
Fernando of Sri Lanka, filed a lawsuit against the prince, alleging
they were held for five months against their will, "by means of
unlawful threats, intimidation and physical force." They say they were
only partially paid, were denied medical treatment, and suffered
mental and physical abuse.
In March 2005, a wife of Saudi Prince Mohamed Bin Turki Alsaud, Hana
Al Jader, 39, was arrested at her home near Boston on charges of
forced labor, domestic servitude, falsifying records, visa fraud, and
harboring aliens. Ms. Al Jader stands accused of forcing two
Indonesian women to work for her by making them believe "that if they
did not perform such labor, they would suffer serious harm." If
convicted, Ms. Al Jader faces up to 140 years in jail and $2.5 million
in fines.
There are many other similar instances, for example, the Orlando
escapades of Saudi princesses Maha al-Sudairi and Buniah al-Saud. The
writer Joel Mowbray tells of twelve female domestics "trapped and
abused" in the households of Saudi dignitaries or diplomats.
Why is this problem so acute for affluent Saudis? Four reasons come to
mind. Although slavery was abolished in the kingdom in 1962, the
practice still flourishes there. Ranking Saudi religious authorities
endorse slavery; for example, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan insisted recently
that "Slavery is a part of Islam" and whoever wants it abolished is
"an infidel."
The U.S. State Department knows about the forced servitude in Saudi
households and laws exist to combat this scourge but, as Mr. Mowbray
argues, it "refuses to take measures to combat it." Finally, Saudis
know they can get away with nearly any misbehavior. Their embassy
provides funds, letters of support, lawyers, retroactive diplomatic
immunity, former U.S. ambassadors as troubleshooters, and even
aircraft out of the country; it also keeps pesky witnesses away.
Given the American government's lax attitude toward the Saudis,
slavery in Denver, Miami, Washington, Houston, Boston, and Orlando
hardly comes as a surprise. Only when Washington more robustly
represents American interests will Saudi behavior improve.
Brian Dooley
Such behaviour is the antithesis of proper capitalist behaviour -
if he doesn't understand that then how can he be trusted for
anything?
--
Brian Dooley
Wellington New Zealand
Sue Bilstein
Indeed.
>if he doesn't understand that then how can he be trusted for
>anything?
He is just a journalist; like the rest of them, read for amusement,
with a big pinch of salt.
Michael Wallace
Where are the loony left to decry the rights of these animals (I'm
talking about the sheep and cattle - not Muslims)?
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The Muslim faithful are supposed to sacrifice
sheep or other livestock for the Eid al-Adha festival, but in Turkey
more than 1,600 people cut themselves and two died of heart attacks on
Tuesday.
Turkey’s streets annually run with blood as sheep and cattle have
their throats cut on pavements and waste ground to commemorate
Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. The scenes are
decried by the secular media which every year calls for an end to the
public slaughter.
Three people suffered heart attacks and two of them died while
carrying out sacrifices, state-run Anatolian news agency said, and
1,664 were hospitalised nationwide, mostly from cuts suffered while
trying to hold down struggling beasts.
Television showed a number of bulls escaping the knife and running
down the streets. One butted open the door of a corner shop and took
refuge inside. Angry bulls in at least two places attacked their
would-be killers and put them in hospital.
But one man in the western province of Bolu solved the problem of how
to catch an escaped bull by shooting it in the legs with a shot-gun
and then cutting its throat.
A portion of the meat from the dead animals is distributed to the
poor.
Dave Janes
<ca...@partsdirectaust.com.au> wrote:
>
>Where are the loony left to decry the rights of these animals (I'm
>talking about the sheep and cattle - not Muslims)?
>
>
>ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The Muslim faithful are supposed to sacrifice
>sheep or other livestock for the Eid al-Adha festival, but in Turkey
>more than 1,600 people cut themselves and two died of heart attacks on
>Tuesday.
>
>Turkey’s streets annually run with blood as sheep and cattle have
>their throats cut on pavements and waste ground to commemorate
>Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God.
Silly assholes!
If I were god I'd take their slaughter as an affront. I'd want what
Abraham was offering. The blood of their sons and nothing less.
It doesn't read like a commemoration. More like an act of blasphemy.
Why would the idiots think god would or should settle for anything
less?
Nice of them to feed the poor though. For that they should only have
to spend half of eternity in purgatory.
Michael Wallace
<notea_...@islandnet.com> wrote:
}In article <ibias1dr9vt2h3gtt...@4ax.com>,
} Michael Wallace <ca...@partsdirectaust.com.au> wrote:
}
}> Where are the loony left to decry the rights of these animals (I'm
}> talking about the sheep and cattle - not Muslims)?
}>
}
}I suppose the looney left are busy trying to save innocent people in
}other countries from the rightwing crazy warmongering murderers that are
}supposed to be on our side, but are doing everything they can to
}undermine democracy.
}
Sure they are, tiring organising and going to all those rent-a-crowd
anti-globalisation and peace rallies.
Brian Dooley
On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 21:19:32 +1300, Sue Bilstein
<sue_bi...@yahoop.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:33:01 +1300, Brian Dooley
><bri...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>>On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:52:17 +1300, Sue Bilstein
>><sue_bi...@yahoop.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>I haven't read a lot of Steyn's stuff, but I do see his column in the
>>>Spectator (that left-wing rag) from time to time. I was not impressed
>>>with the piece he wrote about Conrad Black. He seemed to have no
>>>understanding that it is a very bad thing for executives to plunder
>>>their corporations - or that we punish them severely because this
>>>behaviour, if winked at, leads to economic collapse.
>>
>>Such behaviour is the antithesis of proper capitalist behaviour -
>
>Indeed.
>
>>if he doesn't understand that then how can he be trusted for
>>anything?
>
>He is just a journalist; like the rest of them, read for amusement,
>with a big pinch of salt.
Tell your mates that.
Michael Wallace
A VR image of the place, you can almost smell the stench of a million
camel fucking goat herders. If any place needs to be nuked into powder
this is at the top of the list.
http://vrm.vrway.com/issue23/THE_PROPHET_S_MOSQUE_MASJID_AL-NABAWI_SAUDI_ARABIA.html
Gordon Levi
Could you explain why you would prefer this should be a nuclear target
rather than Canterbury Cathedral or Saint Peter’s Basilica? From the
pictures they all seem to be extravagant structures to the glory of
their God and/or their dogma.
Michael Wallace
wrote:
Because they are Muslims, you twit.